Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Reconnecting

The replenishment of his electoral mandate in June–July 1996 was a peerless ordering moment in the Yeltsin presidency. Holding an election for chief executive on track and in more or less competitive fashion affirmed the post-communist regime and its reliance on popular consent. Yeltsin’s 1996 victory must rate with the 1991 putsch as his magic hour as practitioner of mass politics. It gave him a fresh lease on political life and another crack at governing, at heavy cost to his health. It prevented neo-communists from retaking power and undoing some or all of the changes of the preceding decade. And it pulled new participants, and new techniques for exercising influence, onto Russia’s civil stage.

It was not predetermined that Yeltsin would be a candidate for re-election upon expiration of his five-year term. He told Aleksandr Korzhakov in the spring of 1992 that he would “not be able to bear up under a second term” and needed to find a successor, and in May he said in a press interview that there was “a limit to a person’s physical and other abilities” and his first term would be his last.¹ Richard Nixon, dropping in on him in June 1992, called his disclaimer a fiendishly clever strategy—“a masterstroke” that transmitted his fearlessness as a reformer “and would be to Yeltsin’s advantage even should he eventually decide to run again.” Yeltsin gave a knowing smile and said that “of course” he would benefit politically; how he would was impossible to make out.² He commented to Bill Clinton, still a U.S. presidential candidate, in Washington that same month that taking himself out of the running had already had “an important psychological impact” and that people appreciated “that I’m not fighting to stay in office but to ensure that the reforms become irreversible.”³

Yeltsin soon second-guessed the decision. He declared, the week after dissolving the Supreme Soviet in September 1993, that he would be willing to proceed with a presidential election, and to be a candidate, in the summer of 1994—a statement he revoked just as suddenly that November. In March 1994, when an article in Izvestiya maintained that he would participate in the next election “only in his capacity as a voter,” Yeltsin had his press secretary persuade the paper to print a new article saying he was agnostic about standing. Later in 1994 there was a different iron in the fire: the idea of postponing, in the interests of political stability, the Duma election slated for 1995 and/or the presidential election slated for 1996. Gennadii Burbulis, no longer a member of the government but still influential in the liberal beau monde, wanted Yeltsin to extend his term by decree for two years and not to seek re-election. Although these and related proposals bristled with constitutional complications, Yeltsin was content to leave them in play. Aides were kept in the dark about his true intent but formed the impression by the summer of 1994 that the president meant to run, be it in 1996 or 1998, and they should begin to clear the decks. This was also the burden of remarks he made to staffers in 1995.⁴

Reconnecting with the electorate was going to take some doing. Entranced by the Kremlin and high politics, Yeltsin had long since let his reputation as “people’s president” lose its luster. To be sure, he continued to escape Moscow and accept bread and salt, the customary token of Russian hospitality, in the provinces. A hobby project of his in 1992–93 was to circuit through every subunit of the federation. He dug in against staffers who urged him to prioritize the populous regions and align his peregrinations with the Moscow political calendar.⁵ When out in the field, he could still gladhand with the best of them. Unlike Gorbachev, who invariably initiated group conversations, Yeltsin’s way was to wait for someone else to lead off and to make a retort, and one that frequently contained a nonverbal element. In May 1992, for example, he held court at the Omsk Oil Refinery in west Siberia. Hearing out one disgruntled worker, Yeltsin gave him a light slap on the forehead and cried “Mosquito!” after which the two men swapped jokes. To the refinery employees, it was a playful and egalitarian gesture.⁶ In June 1994 Yeltsin descended on Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva, the mountain republic of shamanistic and Buddhist heritage on the border with Mongolia. Decked out in the national costume at a concert by Kongar-ool Ondar, Tuva’s renowned throat singer, he mounted the stage, hummed along, and quaffed arakar, a potent beverage from fermented goat’s milk.⁷

Russians after 1991 rarely accorded Yeltsin an abusive reception. Correspondents in the advance party would see the eyes of local residents light up when the president’s blue Mi-8 chopper landed on the tarmac, especially if he shushed his bodyguards and waded into the throng: “We would stand around [beforehand] and ask people what they made of Yeltsin. They would do nothing but denounce him something fierce: ‘As soon as he gets here we are going to tear him to shreds,’ that type of thing. Then Yeltsin showed up, perhaps not in the best of form, and did a walkabout. And suddenly these very same people would be saying, ‘Oh, Boris Nikolayevich, may you be healthy, you are one of us.’”⁸ These swooning scenes speak volumes about the Russian tradition of deference to leaders. Members of the crowd often came up and asked Yeltsin to intercede on a family or community problem; adjutants took down the requests and referred them to central or local functionaries.

Nonetheless, as the first term wore on, Yeltsin communed person-to-person with his fellow citizens less and less. Security tightened during the 1993 constitutional conflict and when the Chechen war made him an assassination target. Some governors discouraged him from making appearances when in their regions. A tour in the spring of 1995 was aborted after one stop because of lack of interest in the events.⁹ Yeltsin’s extemporaneous contacts with the masses, the press corps noticed, were getting to be more perfunctory. “He preferred to go up to the crowd, slap it on the back… and get away,” is how Tatyana Malkina, a beat reporter for the newspaper Segodnya, recalls it. Yeltsin, she said, was losing sight of “people” (lyudi) and starting to see only “the people” (narod).¹⁰

As the 1995–96 election season approached, it was equally apparent that Yeltsin lacked a key resource that leaders and aspiring leaders have in the retail politics of mature democracies: an effective party. Post-Soviet Russia was a petri dish for political parties and protoparties (there were 273 of them registered in 1995), and they were found in every ideological hue, from fascist to feminist. Quality, admittedly, did not match quantity, and many of these organizations were jerry-built, personality-driven, and transient.¹¹ Nonetheless, a party or mass movement of his own would have given Yeltsin a chance to advance positions, build organizational capacity in the parliamentary election arena, and utilize them in a presidential campaign.

There had been no want of schemes for hatching a Yeltsin party. Early on in his administration, advisers Gennadii Burbulis, Sergei Stankevich, and Galina Starovoitova pushed a broad-based national party—an August Bloc, they suggested calling it, in honor of the turning back of the coup. In March 1992 Yeltsin received the representatives of several dozen liberal organizations and said he was for creation of a pro-reform Assembly of Russian Citizens. All that came from it was a charter meeting in April, chaired by Burbulis. The plan revived in June 1992 as an Association in Support of Democracy and Reforms, bracketing forty-three reformist groups. In consultations, Yeltsin gave it his imprimatur, said that in principle he might lead it, and even expressed a preference for a name with the words “people’s” or “democratic” in it. This endeavor, too, trailed off into nothingness. Then, after the April 1993 referendum, Burbulis and Stankevich thought they had won Yeltsin over to an overarching League of the Twenty-Fifth of April or an April Alliance in the same mold. All over again, they were unable to get him to act.¹²

Russia’s Choice in the 1993 Duma election was a Yeltsin-friendly electoral formation that did get into the air. Without his assistance, it gathered together government ministers and reformist intellectuals, all in the hopes of a symbiosis with their hero: “Our bloc makes no bones about who is its leader—it is President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.”¹³ Yeltsin indicated to Yegor Gaidar, who headed up the list of candidates, that he would throw his weight behind them. On his journey to Japan in October, he promised Gaidar to address the bloc’s convention and back its list. But he never did. Pouring all of his energies into making and ratifying the constitution, Yeltsin determined at the eleventh hour not to attend the meeting, withheld sanction, and did not take issue when cabinet minister Sergei Shakhrai formed a separate electoral list, the Party of Russian Unity and Accord. A planned post-Tokyo meeting with Russia’s Choice panjandrums became a presidential soliloquy on Asian affairs.¹⁴ Gaidar estimates that a Yeltsin statement would have swung 10 percent of the vote to Russia’s Choice and made it the undisputed winner of the election.¹⁵

Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was behind the next party-building maneuver in 1994 and into 1995. He and Aleksandr Yakovlev founded a Russian Party of Social Democracy, dedicated to democratic values and a mixed economy, and registered it in February 1995. Filatov and Yakovlev felt they had a commitment from Yeltsin to help it with financing, back it in the next Duma election, and chair it after that.¹⁶ Despite assurances, Yeltsin went off on a tangent. Prodded by Shakhrai, the spoiler from 1993, he gave license for not one but two pro-presidential electoral groupings. Our Home Is Russia, headed by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had sat out the 1993 election, was right-of-center programmatically (right in the sense of favoring the market over government control); the bloc struck by Ivan Rybkin, the Duma speaker, was left-of-center (left in the sense of partiality for government direction over the market). On April 25, 1995, Yeltsin jumped the gun to unveil plans for the two blocs to journalists and to blubber that they would stride coordinately in “two columns,” implying that they were apologists for the status quo. After that, he did not bestir himself to help either organization, although he did go on television on December 15 to speak out against the command economy and plans to restore the Soviet Union. Rybkin assumed he was at liberty to rebuke the prime minister and the government, only to find that, whenever he did, Chernomyrdin complained to him and Yeltsin; he also was strapped for campaign funds.¹⁷ On election day, December 17, Rybkin scraped together 1 percent of the popular vote. Our Home Is Russia far exceeded him in resources and had thirty-six governors on its national list, yet Yeltsin made slighting comments about its drawing power and it was not able to claim that it spoke for the president. Chernomyrdin noted both these points to Korzhakov. “I said to him right away [after Yeltsin made his comments in September], ‘Boris Nikolayevich, this is not my personal initiative only, it is necessary to all of us.’” Yeltsin was unmoved. “And then the governors would ask me, ‘Are you together or not together?’ I would say, ‘What are you talking about, why don’t you want to understand?’ [And they would reply], ‘We’re not able to figure it out, and that is it.’”¹⁸ On December 17 Our Home Is Russia finished with a puny 10 percent. The winner in the popular vote (with 23 percent) and in seats was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the KPRF, which was ferally opposed to Yeltsin.

Why all the bobbing and weaving on affiliation with a party? Yeltsin did not offer a reason during his years as president. In an interview in the privacy of retirement, he offered this comment:

Having chafed at the ruling party in the past, Yeltsin was pleased to be unbound from it and from anything that reeked of its subservient culture. For the present, he considered the president to be above the fray and representative of the whole nation, very much in the spirit of his constitution. The not caring to “lobby” for any organization was what registered most in the political elite. As one former activist in the Interregional group observed, from the turn of the 1990s onward Yeltsin “did not want any structure that might force upon him the necessity to coordinate his decisions with others.”²⁰ From this perspective, a party was harmful less for constraining followers than for constraining the leader. Yeltsin had seen Gorbachev labor to steer both the CPSU and the Soviet state, while he as an oppositionist had flexibility after he walked out of the party in 1990. He was not sure how agreeable Russia’s untrammeled political elite would be to reimposition of partisan discipline in any form. And he knew that party organizations in open or semi-open political systems provide opportunities for subleaders to excel, and that subleaders can become rivals to the alpha leader if his grip slackens. In 1995 Yeltsin desired Our Home Is Russia to do well in the Duma campaign but not so well as to make Chernomyrdin a credible pretender to the presidential suite. Chernomyrdin would say in an interview that Yeltsin’s Kremlin entourage “feared that Chernomyrdin would get too strong, with 1996 coming up.”²¹ It would not have taken such a position without the president knowing.

Yeltsin’s allergic reaction to the party form was in keeping with his style of acting and governing—visceral and charismatic rather than cerebral and institutional. As with his reluctance to act as propagandist for Russia’s transformation, he was overcompensating for aspects of the totalitarian past. At times when he saw salvation in hooking up directly with the people, a permanent party machine might have posed hurdles. But a party can work for a leader and a cause: by supplying a brand with which citizens can identify, sharing responsibility for making choices in government, and acting as a repository of ideas. With no party at his side, Yeltsin, as Oleg Poptsov wrote, had difficulty answering the question, “Who is the president with?”²² Charles de Gaulle in France, who had slighted the Fourth Republic as a “regime of parties” that divided society, came to see the merits of an integrating, pro-presidential quasi-party, the Union for the New Republic, in his Fifth Republic. Yeltsin never drew the same conclusion in Russia.

And who was with Yeltsin as the 1996 election train pulled out of the station ? Public opinion surveys in 1995 showed not very many unqualified supporters remained and that as few as 5 percent of citizens had the firm intent of voting for him if he were to run.²³ Observers frequently gave him no chance of prevailing and forecast a sweep by Gennadii Zyuganov of the KPRF. Yegor Gaidar was typical in a statement in February: “No matter how you arrange the possible coalitions, it is hard to imagine that the president will win.”²⁴ But the polls also showed that a goodly portion of the electorate was undecided and that the attitude of roughly 40 percent of Russians was ambivalent: They were disappointed in Yeltsin but not unalterably against, they hoped he might do better in the future, or they preferred him to the available alternatives, as the best of a bad lot. These numbers, and the two-stage electoral format, which would allow a candidate into a runoff round, were one to be needed, with well under half of the votes, held open the possibility that Yeltsin would be able to turn things around on the campaign trail.²⁵

Yeltsin firmed up his choice to seek a second term in late December 1995, a month in which his political allies suffered defeat in the parliamentary election and he endured his third coronary in a half-year. Naina Yeltsina and their daughters were moved to tears by the very suggestion. Physicians had reported that the rigors of an electioneering marathon might kill him or shorten his life and leave him incapacitated.²⁶ Not for the first time, Yeltsin overrode family and medical science.

His motivations, as always, were a jumble. In political terms, the neo-communists he so detested were now the main enemy and would gain the most from a failure to stand and fight: “The idea that I myself would facilitate the communists coming to power was more than I could bear.”²⁷ In personal terms, the stacking of the deck against him made the challenge seem especially worthwhile. As he met staff after New Year’s to inform them of his decision, he took umbrage at reports that pollsters hired by the Kremlin found his popularity at a record low: “I am being stuffed to the gills with sociology, but I myself know sociology better than the whole lot of you.”²⁸ His memoir selfportrait of those weeks might be captioned “King Lear Makes a Comeback.” “My whole life was buffeted by all manner of storms and winds,” he wrote. “I was on my feet but almost knocked over by the gusts.” His health was bad, power was slipping through his fingers, trusted comrades were letting him down, and the people would not forgive him for shock therapy and Chechnya. “It appeared as if all was lost. But this was one of those moments when a sort of clarity comes over me. With a clear head, I said to myself, ‘If I run in this election I am going to win it without any doubt.’ This I knew with certitude, regardless of all the forecasts, all the polls…. Most likely, I was saved by my imperishable passion and my will to resist.”²⁹ Yegor Gaidar in his memoirs was to call up a Russian cultural trope: “Our Il’ya Muromets had finally roused himself.”³⁰

Yeltsin left Moscow’s Vnukovo field on February 15 to make the official announcement in old Urals haunts. Aides and ministers had been summoned to the airport. “With his storied stare, he looked around at all the functionaries there to send him off and asked with great sincerity, ‘So tell me, do you think it’s not worth it for me to get mixed up in this business?’ And the answer that rang out was, of course, a simultaneous chorus of voices: ‘How can you say such a thing, Boris Nikolayevich, what is this all about? You must!’” “If I must, then I must,” Yeltsin replied.³¹ His speech in Yekaterinburg was in the same Youth Palace where he had dialogue with local students as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom fifteen years before. Battling laryngitis, he portrayed himself as ready to learn from his mistakes but not to turn back the clock: “I am for reforms but not at any price. I am for a correction in course but not a return to the past. I am for basing Russian politics not on utopia and dogmas but on practical utility.” He struck an inclusive note, suggesting that he shared the people’s concerns about the road taken since 1991, yet reproved reactionaries who rejected the trajectory. “We,” he proclaimed, “are stronger than those who for all these years have put a spoke in the wheel and have impeded our motion toward a great and free Russia…. We are stronger than our own disappointments and doubts. We are tired out but we are together, and we will win.”³²

The “we” at the head of the uphill effort was an open-ended category. On January 15 Yeltsin put Oleg Soskovets, the powerful first deputy premier and friend of Aleksandr Korzhakov, in charge of his re-election headquarters. In the past year, Yeltsin had spoken several times to Soskovets of the possibility of Soskovets in due course succeeding him as president. What with Soskovets’s high position in Moscow, this talk was bound to be taken more seriously than the fleeting conversation he had with Boris Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1994. Yeltsin now conceived of the assignment as a tryout: “I saw it this way: If Oleg Nikolayevich had political ambitions, let him display them. Let him show what kind of politician he was and what kind of political will he possessed, and then we would see.”³³ Loading up the nascent campaign with a secondary objective was a mistake Yeltsin would soon regret. The drive to gather signatures for his nomination papers (one million were required by the 1995 law on presidential elections) was badly bungled. Railway and metallurgical workers were instructed by government officials to sign nominating petitions before collecting their pay at the wicket, and some governors were ordered to deliver signatures on quota.

Around February 1, Yeltsin asked his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, age thirty-six, to sit in on meetings of the Soskovets group. Other than transcribing speeches and canvassing in his early campaigns, this was her first involvement in her father’s politics. She was smart and resolute like her father but soft-spoken and unassuming like her mother. She had felt unfulfilled in the defense-related institute where she had worked for a decade and where she turned down a suggestion in the mid-1980s that she join the Communist Party (she said she did not know enough about politics and did not consider herself “worthy”), and in the bank where she was on staff in 1994–95: “My character is such that I for some reason tend to have inflated expectations of myself. And then it seems that each time I do not quite live up to them.”³⁴ This time she was willing to heed her father’s request.

Dyachenko was soon saying to Yeltsin that something was out of whack with the Soskovets effort.³⁵ But at first nothing much came of her efforts. It was then that Yeltsin’s need to reconnect with the mass electorate intersected with the process of connecting differently with players at the elite level. Come what may, he had to empower a functional campaign staff and to appease other public politicians. A new presence in post-communist politics—the leaders of the nonstate business class that was beginning to amass fabulous wealth in the market economy—showed both tasks in a new light.

The Russian moguls were mostly in their thirties and forties, had been nobodies under Soviet power, and until the year before Yeltsin’s re-election were mostly financiers who made money out of currency speculation, arbitrage, handling governmental deposits, and buying high-interest state debt. On August 31, 1995, Yeltsin had his first meeting with a group of them, about reserve requirements and other banking issues, and referred to the banks as having a political role. “Russian bankers,” he told ten representatives, “take part in the country’s political life…. The banks, like all of Russia, are learning democracy.”³⁶ The loans-for-shares auctions in November–December 1995 allowed the more conspicuous of “the oligarchs,” as they were now known, to reposition as captains of industry. Initially dreamt up by Vladimir Potanin of Oneximbank, this privatization scheme was backed by Chubais but also by Kremlin conservatives like Soskovets, who was the one to get Yeltsin’s signature on it.³⁷ At bargain-basement prices, Potanin picked up Norilsk Nickel, the world’s number one smelter of palladium and nickel, and he, Mikhail Khodorkovskii of Menatep, and Boris Berezovskii acquired the oil giants Sidanco, Yukos, and Sibneft. Two oligarchs also had extensive media interests and were bound to figure in the 1996 campaign: Vladimir Gusinskii of Most Bank was de jure the proprietor of NTV television; his rival Berezovskii had been de facto the moneyman behind the ORT network (formerly Ostankino) since 1994. Relations between Gusinskii and Berezovskii had always been testy, but they were willing in 1996 to set differences aside in order to protect their gains.

The one business figure on the Soskovets board was the hyperactive Berezovskii. He more than any of his colleagues was out to build status and influence in the political realm, to which end he had added to his portfolio the quality newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, the TV-6 entertainment network, and a one-third share in the Ogonëk publishing house. He had frequently offered advice, solicited and unsolicited, to Soskovets and Korzhakov, and lobbied for advantage. His path had crossed Yeltsin’s in November or December 1993, when he and Vladimir Kadannikov volunteered to underwrite publication under the Ogonëk imprint of the Russian edition of volume two of Yeltsin’s memoirs, in which Yeltsin was advanced 10 percent against the domestic royalties. Berezovskii first shook the president’s hand when he went to his office to sign the contract. (The foreign rights, which brought in four or five times the revenue, were handled by the British literary agent Andrew Nurnberg.) In 1994 he was the first businessman to join the Presidential Club.³⁸ Berezovskii also knew Tatyana Dyachenko, though not yet much less cursorily than he knew her father. Korzhakov was to write in his 1997 memoir that at some time in 1994 or 1995 Berezovskii made her a present of two cars: a Russian-made Niva wagon and a Chevrolet Blazer. The claim was claptrap and is controverted by both Dyachenko and Berezovskii.³⁹ But the two were acquainted and had as a friend in common Valentin Yumashev, who had prepared both volumes of Yeltsin’s memoirs for publication. In his professional life, Yumashev was deputy editor of Ogonëk magazine from 1991 to 1995 and director general of the Ogonëk company in 1995–96.⁴⁰

It took only several meetings of the Soskovets group for Berezovskii to conclude that not all was well. From February 2 to 5, he and seventy other Russian capitalists and officials attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they were upset by the polite reception given to Gennadii Zyuganov, who had a bulge over Yeltsin in the polls. At Berezovskii’s suggestion, Viktor Ilyushin arranged for Yeltsin to host an unpublicized Kremlin luncheon for six businessmen—Berezovskii, Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii of SBS-Agro Bank, and Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank—and Chubais, who had been Yeltsin’s deputy for privatization until Yeltsin threw him to the wolves in January as a result of the Duma election. The meal was held about a fortnight after the Davos forum, in Shrovetide on the Russian calendar, and the chef served traditional fare for the season: pancakes with garnishes and drinks.⁴¹ Yeltsin had thought the diners wanted to speak with him about campaign finance, since “they had nowhere to go and would have to support me,” but the conversation was about the hopelessness of the Soviet-style effort under Soskovets. “I had not expected such tough talk,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon.⁴² Gusinskii and Chubais held nothing back. “Boris Nikolayevich,” Chubais stated, “your popularity rating is zero.” As usual when he was confronted by unlovely news, the meeting was marked by a long silence from the chair. One of the visitors, Khodorkovskii, thought “the tsar was thinking about whether to send of us all to the execution block”; another, Smolenskii, said in 2003 that “the pause was so loud that I hear it to this day.”⁴³ The frank comments gave every appearance of shaking Yeltsin out of his apathy. Hesitating to catch his breath, he asked what they recommended. He promised after forty minutes of discussion to think about ways to energize the campaign and to involve Chubais and associates of big business in it. Berezovskii stayed to chat with Yeltsin briefly after the group dispersed.⁴⁴

It is important to realize, though, that the dialogue with the magnates had no immediate effect.⁴⁵ Almost a month after the Kremlin meeting, on March 14, Yeltsin’s political assistant, Georgii Satarov, and a group of consultants sent him a blistering memorandum noting that the campaign was still a shambles:

I have no doubt that Yeltsin did not reorganize in February for a reason—because he had not yet resolved the bedrock dilemma of whether there should be a presidential election at all. The detonator here was a nonbinding resolution by the newly elected State Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the Supreme Soviet vote of December 12, 1991, on the Belovezh’e accord. Sponsored by the KPRF caucus and passed by a majority of 250 to ninety-eight, the vote asserted in effect that the Soviet Union and the legislation undergirding it still had legal force. Yeltsin reacted with indignation to an “attempt to liquidate our statehood” that “casts doubt on the legitimacy” of the new Russia and its political system.⁴⁷ Within twenty-four hours, the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, fearing a loss to the communists in the forthcoming election and sensing an opportunity to prevail in the palace struggle—where Korzhakov had not yet persuaded Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister and thus to put him in the line of succession—had come up with a proposal to postpone the presidential election until 1998, ban the KPRF, and shut down the Duma so as to rule by executive decree for the two years. The proposal took the postponement project entertained by Moscow democrats in 1994–95 and linked it to radically anti-democratic ends.⁴⁸

Yeltsin at first bought into the idea. On the morning of March 17, he ordered his aides to draft implementing directives and law-enforcement officers to make operational plans. There were, even so, dissenting voices, and Yeltsin did not shut them out. Viktor Ilyushin, four of Yeltsin’s liberal assistants, and Sergei Shakhrai said in a memorandum that they could not write a general decree because they could come up with no legal basis for it. Were one to be written and signed, they warned, Russia could be in for a civil war.⁴⁹ Anatolii Kulikov, the MVD minister who had led the ministry’s troops in Chechnya in 1994–95, rallied the procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, and the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Tumanov, to come out against the decision as unworkable, in part because his best soldiers were still embroiled in the North Caucasus. They saw him together in his office: “The president was really and truly glum. His complexion was sallow, he was ungracious…. He especially disliked that we had come as a threesome.” “Minister, I am dissatisfied with you,” Yeltsin spluttered. “A decree will follow shortly. Leave and prepare to implement it.” Kulikov and two officers secured a second Kremlin meeting, at six A.M. sharp on Monday, March 18. Yeltsin was in a darker mood than the day before and would not shake hands with them; Kulikov could see on the presidential desk an unsigned decree dismissing him. Repeating that Yeltsin had no constitutional or moral case, he added that there was no evidence the army would back the president, and that the communists would go underground as martyrs for principle. “Yeltsin interrupted me and said, ‘This is my affair and not yours.’” When Kulikov hung in, Yeltsin reminded him that “you are sitting in my office” and rebuked him for speaking on others’ behalf. But the minister stuck to his guns, and Yeltsin showed signs of fickleness and allowed that the communists might have to be turned back “in stages.”⁵⁰ President Clinton, alerted by Yegor Gaidar (who sent a message through Ambassador Thomas Pickering), had written Yeltsin a private letter about the need to hold the election on timetable.⁵¹ Chernomyrdin and Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow were against the project as well.

But the greatest influences, according to Yeltsin, were not Kulikov or Clinton and not the oligarchs, with whom he had been out of contact. They were Tatyana Dyachenko and Anatolii Chubais. Tatyana secured an appointment with Yeltsin for Chubais, also on March 18, and Chubais for the one and only time in his years with Yeltsin raised the volume of his voice in protest. The one-hour meeting, Yeltsin said in his memoirs, made him feel “ashamed before those who had trusted me.” He got in a poke at Chubais in the conversation—“You also made plenty of mistakes in privatization,” he said. But he heeded the advice and that day dropped his ill-considered plan.⁵² Blessedly for Russia and for his reputation, he had come to his senses—for which those who tar him with neo-Bolshevism give him not a granule of thanks. “The president,” Kulikov writes accurately, “was wise enough to overstep himself and his character. He understood that the undertaking could end tragically and that some people were trying to use him.”⁵³

On March 19, the day after finally giving the election a green light, Yeltsin appointed a new campaign council, chaired by himself, with Viktor Chernomyrdin as deputy chairman. But his most consequential decision was to impanel an “analytical group” under Chubais, who had agreed to it at a rendezvous with the oligarchs in Berezovskii’s Logovaz Club—an ideal place, Berezovskii chortled, because no one could bug it with listening devices except him. Chubais accepted several million dollars up front for campaign expenses, from which he was to deduct a monthly salary of $60,000. True to form, Yeltsin did not do away with the Soskovets grouping, whose senior members joined the council and which continued to occupy offices on a different floor of the Presidential Hotel. The nomination formalities, completed by April 5, were dealt with by an All-Russian Movement for Public Support of the President, an ecumenical front of 250 preexisting organizations headed up by Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s former chief of staff. It stayed around to liaise with regional and local leaders, while another organization still, People’s House, made connections to citizen groups and was the unofficial disburser of campaign funds.

The nerve center was the Chubais workshop, which, beginning about April 1, met five or six days a week, two to three hours at a time. Yeltsin sat in on a half-dozen of its meetings, although, knowing his aversion to collective decision making, members mostly went to see him singly or in pairs. The group took in the pollster Aleksandr Oslon, of the Public Opinion Foundation; Valentin Yumashev; presidential assistants Ilyushin and Satarov; Vasilii Shakhnovskii, chief of staff to Mayor Luzhkov; Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, and Sergei Zverev, an executive in Media-Most, NTV’s corporate parent; and Sergei Shakhrai, once deputy premier and now a Duma deputy. The tenth member was Tatyana Dyachenko. Casually dressed and in flowing bangs, she was never far from Yeltsin’s side between then and the July runoff. She carried messages back and forth and advised on his grooming and the staging of campaign appearances. “On everything else,” says an eyewitness, “she felt herself unprepared.”⁵⁴

Aleksandr Korzhakov, stung by Yeltsin’s change of heart, traduced the new team and continued his efforts to abort the election, holding exploratory talks with Chernomyrdin, the KPRF leadership, and others. On April 16, in a lengthy meeting with the prime minister at the Presidential Club, he flattered Chernomyrdin and poked fun at the Chubais group (they were wetbehind-the-ears pupils and laboratory assistants), savaged Viktor Ilyushin for defecting to them (“Viktor has no ideas of his own”), and said the vote, if held, was winnable by only a few percentage points and would thus be illegitimate. Apparently getting some sympathy from Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov said again that the presidential election should be postponed by two years and, in a new kink, that the neo-communists should be brought into a coalition government to rule until then. “The chief himself will be against this idea,” Korzhakov quotes himself as saying about Yeltsin, “but he can be broken.”⁵⁵ In late April, in Khabarovsk, Korzhakov pulled aside Naina Yeltsina and asked her to deliver a letter to the chief. She was reluctant, since she stayed out of decisions of state, but gave Yeltsin the letter at Barvikha-4 upon their return. It touched on the election and argued that there was an urgent need to appoint Oleg Soskovets prime minister. Yeltsin read it and threw it in the wastebasket, an angry look on his face.⁵⁶ On May 5 Korzhakov, who rarely spoke with journalists, brazenly called in a press interview for a two-year deferral of the vote for stability’s sake. The next day, with a beatific-looking Korzhakov behind him, Yeltsin informed the press that the election would be held without fail and that he had ordered his chief bodyguard “not to meddle in politics.” “I trust in the wisdom of the Russian voters,” he said. “That’s why the election will be held in the time determined by the constitution.”⁵⁷

Yeltsin took some time to make his peace with the re-election assignment and with having to ask the people on bended knee for what he had come to see as rightfully his, so unlike the cakewalks of 1989, 1990, and 1991. By the time he made his first forays into the heartland, he had modified his posture. What tipped him were recognition of the novelty of the quest, the alacrity of the Chubais group, and the clicking in of his personal testing script: “He caught fire…. He assimilated it as a new game for himself…. He was the ideal candidate. It had all begun to be attractive to him. He could not get enough of it.”⁵⁸

The principal adversary was Gennadii Zyuganov, who had chaired the KPRF since its founding in 1993. Zyuganov, a propaganda specialist in his home province of Orël and in Moscow before 1991, epitomized the gray apparatchik who had kept faith with state socialism. Presenting himself as the voice of “responsible opposition” and of “popular-patriotic forces” that went beyond his party, he charged that Yeltsin had not kept a single promise since he beat out Nikolai Ryzhkov for the presidency five years before. He advocated constitutional changes to strengthen parliament and reintroduce the office of vice president (Yeltsin’s former vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, supported Zyuganov), appointment of a medical commission to review the health of leaders (an obvious dig at Yeltsin), settlement of back wages, measures “to guarantee all citizens the right to labor, leisure, housing, free education and medical care, and a worthy old age,” and a review of privatization policy.⁵⁹

The two principal combatants were joined by a piebald field of eight lesser contestants. Two were put forward by political parties that had standing in the Duma: Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the publicity hound and head of the scrappily imperialist LDPR; and Grigorii Yavlinskii of the liberal Yabloko Party, an economist by training and one of the authors of the Five Hundred Days Program in 1990. The semiforgotten Mikhail Gorbachev chose to run for the office that Yeltsin had used to destroy his power base, describing himself as Russia’s candidate of “consolidation.” The most serious of the independent candidates was Aleksandr Lebed, a gravel-voiced professional soldier from the Soviet military’s airborne branch who had retired from the service as a two-star general in 1995. Lebed’s defense of the Slavic minorities in post-Soviet Moldova, as commander of the Russian Fourteenth Army there, gave him cachet with nationalists, and his platform emphasized law and order. The four remaining candidates ran as personalities, although nominated by tiny political organizations: Vladimir Bryntsalov, a businessman who had made millions in the pharmaceuticals industry; Svyatoslav Fëdorov, the eye surgeon whom Yeltsin had tried to make prime minister in 1991; Martin Shakkum, a think-tank scholar; and Yurii Vlasov, once a world-champion weightlifter and now a Duma deputy and Russian chauvinist.⁶⁰

Yeltsin and his administration did nothing to impede the registration of other candidates but did try hard to persuade several of them to drop out in his favor or at a minimum not to come together into a potential “third force” in the campaign. The priorities were Lebed, whose curt, masculine deportment was selling well,⁶¹ and Yavlinskii. Since Yeltsin knew from polls that Lebed would draw first-round votes away from Zyuganov, the objective was to gain his cooperation in the two-candidate runoff, Zyuganov against Yeltsin, that was expected to follow. Lebed initiated the contact secretly and met in April with Aleksandr Korzhakov. Korzhakov offered him command of Russian airborne forces, saying he did not know enough about the economy to succeed in politics, and Lebed declined, with the statement, “I know my price.”⁶² Lebed called on Yeltsin in the Kremlin on May 2 and the negotiations restarted. Within several weeks, the general agreed to throw his support to the president in the second round; he would get an infusion of campaign funds in the first round and appointment as minister of defense after it.⁶³ Aleksandr Oslon’s research showed Yavlinskii as competing for votes with Yeltsin, not Zyuganov, and suggested that his supporters would migrate naturally to Yeltsin in the second round, so it was desirable to knock him out of round one. Negotiations through intermediaries began in January, and Yavlinskii met with Yeltsin on May 5 and 16. The older man “entreated, browbeat, pressured, and buttered up” the younger to throw in the towel and accept the position of first deputy premier; Yavlinskii demanded the dismissal of Chernomyrdin and other points Yeltsin found unacceptable. “I would not have withdrawn, either,” Yeltsin told him as he showed him to the door in Building No. 1 on May 16.⁶⁴

Bare-knuckle tactics were deployed in other areas, too. Chernomyrdin assigned a deputy premier, Yurii Yarov, to work daily with the campaign staff and see to it that the federal bureaucracy used “administrative levers” as best it could to the president’s gain. Sergei Shakhrai handled relations with the governors and republic presidents, most of whom swung into line.⁶⁵ The Kremlin collected explicit endorsements, among them from dignitaries (such as Yegor Gaidar) who had split with Yeltsin, and unformalized support from the Russian Orthodox Church and the military hierarchy. The mass media, and especially the three national television channels, on which paid advertising for the candidates opened on May 14, were of special concern. The ORT and RTR networks were owned by the state; NTV was privately owned and had been very critical of the war in Chechnya, but it broadcast on sufferance of Yeltsin’s government. And yet, coercion was not the primary reason the media sided with Yeltsin in 1996. Since the alternatives appeared to boil down to him or a return of the communists who had censored the press for seventy years, it seemed to most journalists and media managers, as Igor Malashenko put it, that “damaging” as it might have been for the press to take sides in a political conflict, its corporate self-interest meant it “did not have any choice” in the matter. Malashenko remained as president of NTV while moonlighting as Yeltsin’s chief media adviser. Although he considered resigning or going on leave from the network, “I believed this would have been just cant, because everybody in Russia would know that this is not the United States, that my position in the [NTV] group would be the same.”⁶⁶ Between mid-May and mid-June, 55 percent of all campaign stories on ORT’s nightly prime-time news mentioned Yeltsin, compared to 35 percent mentions for Zyuganov; on NTV’s program, it was 59 percent and 34 percent.⁶⁷

None of these methods, however, was enough to dictate victory. Yeltsin was not able to oust Yavlinskii, and the backing from Lebed would take effect only in a runoff round. The electronic and print media had been skewed toward Our Home Is Russia in 1995, and that had not done the party or Chernomyrdin much good.⁶⁸ A great many citizens distrusted the news media and did not believe them to be even-handed; almost 40 percent of Russians had questions about coverage of the 1995 Duma campaign and more than 50 percent about the 1996 presidential campaign.⁶⁹ Even with the media elite’s bias toward Yeltsin, the flow of information and advocacy that got through to individual voters was quite large and diverse. Paid ads aside, a lottery gave all candidates eight free ten-minute slots on national television. As of the beginning of June, a non-trivial 45 percent of the population had been exposed to Zyuganov campaign materials on television, on the radio, or in print in the preceding week; for Yeltsin, it was 58 percent.⁷⁰ And news bulletins, particularly on NTV, offered substantial reportage on opposition candidates (mostly by replaying their words) and on issues, such as economic difficulties and Yeltsin’s health, that were inconvenient for the president.⁷¹

From his single-digit popularity in January, Yeltsin rebounded to a plurality of the votes in June and a second-round majority in July. In Aleksandr Oslon’s first systematic poll of the electorate on March 1, 13 percent of Russians intending to vote in the first round preferred Yeltsin and 19 percent Zyuganov. Over the course of March and April, Yeltsin’s anticipated vote share doubled while Zyuganov’s only edged up. The first Oslon poll to show Yeltsin ahead of Zyuganov, by 23 percent to 22 percent, was on April 13, but they were tied on April 20 and again on May 4. On May 11 Yeltsin nosed ahead by 4 points, by 28 percent to 24 percent, and he never looked back after that. By June 11, 36 percent of citizens intended to vote for him and Zyuganov’s expected share had dipped to 18 percent.⁷² The spread narrowed some by election day, but any way you look at it was a blockbuster recovery. And it was achieved in all demographic subgroups, be they by age, community size and location, gender, or social class.⁷³

One device whereby Yeltsin could overcome his initial deficit in public opinion was to employ incumbency to bolster his image, shape the campaign agenda, and offer amends for the deficiencies of the previous five years. Even before declaring his candidacy, he issued the first of a string of edicts directing material assistance to target groups. On January 25 he decreed a 50 percent increase in payments to recipients of old-age, survivor, and invalid pensions above the minimum pension. Another decree raised grants for students in universities and institutes by 20 percent. On February 1 he ordered stricter schedules for payment of wages to public-sector workers, including the military and police. Orders to clear up arrears in the nonstate sector were given the next week.

The foreign-policy realm offered opportunities for reputation building. Bill Clinton had agreed in 1995 to hold off on NATO enlargement until after the election, responding to Yeltsin’s plea that “my position heading into 1996 is not exactly brilliant.”⁷⁴ Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany visited Yeltsin on February 20, four days after his statement of candidacy, and pronounced him “the best president for Russia.” Kohl, it is claimed, offered Yeltsin political asylum in Germany should he lose the election, a suggestion Yeltsin found insulting.⁷⁵ In March the IMF unveiled a $10.2 billion loan to the Russian government, the second-largest it had ever made. On April 2 Yeltsin signed an agreement with President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus to create a “community” of the post-Soviet neighbors. The document opened, he said, “a qualitatively new stage in the history of our two brotherly peoples.” National television broadcast the Kremlin event live. On April 20 the G-7 leaders were in town for a joint meeting with Russia, chaired by Yeltsin, on nuclear security. It was done, according to President Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, “for no other purpose than to give Yeltsin a pre-election boost.” A meeting at Spaso House with opposition candidates was on Clinton’s itinerary. “It’s okay to shake hands with Zyuganov, Bill,” Yeltsin said, “but don’t kiss him.”⁷⁶ Summiteers Clinton, Jacques Chirac of France, and Ryutaro Hashimoto of Japan stayed on an extra day for bilateral talks and photo ops. Several days later Yeltsin was off to China for a state visit. On May 16 UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali helpfully paid his respects in Moscow, and on May 17 a summit of CIS leaders did the same. James D. Wolfensohn of the World Bank stopped by the Kremlin on May 23 to announce a $500 million project for the coal industry. “The timing of the loan is purely coincidental,” he said with a straight face. “But I was happy to do it in support of the government’s reform efforts.”⁷⁷

A security issue of domestic scope where again incumbency could be applied was the quagmire in Chechnya. With one eye on the opinion polls, Yeltsin on March 31 announced a presidential “peace initiative” designed by his adviser Emil Pain, still claiming there could be no direct negotiations with the separatist president, Djokhar Dudayev. The killing of Dudayev on April 21 (he was hit by a Russian missile while talking on a satellite phone to a member of the State Duma) removed that obstacle, and Yeltsin signaled he was willing to meet the new Chechen leadership. On May 27 a deputation of five fighters, flown to Moscow with their bodyguards in a presidential aircraft, was ushered into a Kremlin office. Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe attended to help mediate. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the leader of the team—a former poet and children’s author, he was attired in green battle fatigues and a papakha, the Chechens’ tall, flat-topped lambskin hat—argued with Yeltsin about seating order, with Yeltsin insisting he be at the head of the table. Yandarbiyev said he might have to pull out of the talks. Yeltsin first told the guards to seal the doors, then asked Guldimann to take his place and sat down across from the Chechen. Yeltsin next sought to gain the upper hand by acting the part of the masterful host. “As an experienced administrator, he knew that in such cases it is best to obtain a psychological advantage over the opposing side. The quickest way to get it is to find a pretense for an earboxing. ‘I do not understand,’ he said in an ice-cold voice. ‘Nobody has ever had the nerve to be late for a meeting with me. You got here late. I could have scrapped our meeting if I felt like it.’ Yandarbiyev shook and made apologies.”⁷⁸ After the conclusion of their conversation, Chernomyrdin stepped in to work out an agreement with Yandarbiyev on a truce in the war, effective midnight May 31, to be followed by an exchange of prisoners and negotiations for a peace settlement. Off-camera, Yeltsin growled that if the Chechens did not honor their commitments, “We know how to find everyone who has signed this document.”⁷⁹

The next day Yeltsin flew to Grozny, pushing aside a warning by officers from the security services, whom he called cowards, that Shamil Basayev’s hawkish group was going to assassinate him by shooting down the presidential helicopter with a U.S.-made Stinger missile. To preempt objections from Naina, he told her he was going to spend the day in the Kremlin. He was accompanied by Governor Boris Nemtsov of Nizhnii Novgorod, who a few months before had presented him with a million signatures from the Volga area protesting the war.⁸⁰ Yeltsin signed two ancillary decrees in the republic, one of them on the steel frame of an armored personnel carrier. Every minute of his six hours there was mined for visuals and sound bites for the final weeks of the election campaign. Aleksandr Oslon’s interviewers found in early June that two-thirds of the electorate approved of Yeltsin’s peace initiative.⁸¹

The second way Yeltsin promoted his candidacy was to bifurcate the electorate around the paradigmatic question of choice of regime and to give the vote the properties of a referendum, in all but name, on communism versus democracy. This was the question Yeltsin had posed with such science during his rise to power, only augmented now with the prospect that any attempt to restore communism would put Russia through one more revolution. Yeltsin’s experience in the Kremlin, reasoned a confidential analysis for the campaign in April, should be made to count in his favor, and it should be coupled with the point that “nothing except instability and unpredictability can be expected” from the other candidates.⁸² In 1995 and early 1996, another memorandum laid out in May, Russians mostly asked who should answer for the country’s plight. “But with the approach of the election the question, ‘Who is guilty?’ began to be replaced by the question, ‘What will it be like after the election?’ For the majority of the population, the future election is connected with the choice of the lesser of two evils. The main motive here is turning out to be to escape shakeups after the election.”⁸³

The self-criticism in Yeltsin’s rhetoric was an invitation to opponents and doubters to cross the line into his camp. Mistakes had been made in the design of the reforms, he said on April 6. “We from the very beginning undervalued the importance of constant dialogue with citizens.” Many Russians had not yet benefited from the post-communist changes, he conceded, and there had arisen “parasitic capital,” which concentrated on the division of property rather than economic growth. But it would be very different in a second Yeltsin term. Russia, he stated, would have a 5 percent economic growth rate within two or three years, and the fruits would be spread around more fairly.⁸⁴

Television ads to expand on Yeltsin’s speeches were prepared by Video International, Russia’s largest TV advertising agency, with advice from the U.S. public-relations firm Ogilvy and Mather—whose 1996 clients included Dresdner Bank, American Express, Unilever, and Telefonica—and from other American and British consultants. Forty-five short ads on the theme “I Believe, I Love, I Hope” ran two or three per evening. Laymen selected to represent a type (farmer, doctor, housewife, athlete, student, and so forth) spoke soothingly about the future in store if Yeltsin got his second mandate. In one of the first to air, a World War II veteran “looks straight into the camera and says wistfully, ‘I just want my children and grandchildren to finally savor the fruits of the victory we fought for and that they didn’t let us enjoy.’ ‘They’ is a not-so-subliminal reference to communists.”⁸⁵ A related series of “Choose or Lose” clips and rock concerts were aimed at getting younger citizens to turn out to vote. At the same time, anti-communist videos, posters, and billboards represented the Soviet regime in a harsh light, through representations of labor camps, bare store shelves, and overage Politburo members reviewing parades on Lenin’s tomb. Borderline demagogic as the line was, it served Yeltsin’s electoral purpose admirably. Of men and women who preferred the post-Soviet political system, almost 70 percent backed Yeltsin on June 16 and fewer than 10 percent voted for Zyuganov; among backers of the Soviet polity, the proportions were reversed.⁸⁶

A third vote-getting technique was hinged on Boris Yeltsin’s persona. The candidate in this mode would be presented as a father figure, rugged and knowing but also suffering and recovering with his people. A gauzy “Vote with Your Heart” ad series was unrolled in May, after extensive survey and focus-group research. As Yeltsin noted in a memoir, “Humble people were shown speaking on the television screen what they thought of me…. Interest in the president’s personality rose. The people were surprised and started thinking… [and] woke up…. ‘Look at the new Yeltsin [they said], he has come alive, he is up to something, so maybe we should bet on him again!’”⁸⁷ In the closing days of the campaign, an ad was aired showing Yeltsin musing about his youth and his courtship of Naina Yeltsina, to the accompaniment of schmaltzy music. To improve her husband’s image, Naina gave press interviews about their children, grandchildren, and family life. A mass-distributed photo album and documentary film shots showed the president bone tired, elated, and frustrated and pictured his thumbless left hand, which he normally did his best to conceal.

This strand of the re-election campaign must be judged a qualified success. In-depth survey data from the summer of 1996 show majorities reckoning Yeltsin to be intelligent and possessed of a vision of Russia’s future, while opinion on his strength and trustworthiness split evenly. On one character trait, though, Yeltsin continued to get consistently critical assessments. That trait was empathy, where respondents were asked if Yeltsin “really cares about people like you.” Only one person in four agreed with that statement, and responses were closely correlated with economic assessments.⁸⁸ That explains the seriousness with which the Yeltsin campaign took its fourth objective—to find ways to bring him down from his lordly perch to relate to Russia’s transitional citizens as human beings.

The greening of Yeltsin could be attempted through the electronic advertising blitz and through creative use of incumbency. In the latter capacity, Yeltsin played Santa Claus for a solid half-year, ladling out material and symbolic largesse to well-selected segments of the populace. The economic payout was brought about by administrative discipline and legerdemain, use of foreign credits, and borrowing against future revenues. In January, February, and March, Yeltsin signed seven or eight decrees per month allocating concrete benefits to particular constituencies; the number hit twenty-two in April and thirty-four in May and the first two weeks of June.⁸⁹ Although many of his acts of generosity were in response to requests, “Often Yeltsin was the inspirer of the decrees, which… grew copiously in the election season. He felt an especially sharp need for them in May. Getting his assistants together, he would demand from them ‘fresh ideas for decrees.’”⁹⁰

Responding to Yeltsin’s January and February directives and to dogged pressure from the government and the presidential executive office, back wages in the nonstate sector were paid up by early April; in the state sector, a large improvement was made by early May. National-level initiatives in social spending raised pensions for war veterans and other elders, allowances for single mothers and diabetics, and salaries and summer pay for teachers and scientists; ordered restitution for bank depositors whose savings were made worthless by hyperinflation in 1992; and instituted a loan program for house builders. Other decrees singled out aerospace contractors, the agrarian complex, and small businesses. In the symbolic domain, there was something for almost everybody. Several decrees recognized the rights of Cossack communities shattered by the communists. In April Yeltsin ruled that a Soviet-style red banner (adorned with a gold star in place of the communist hammer-and-sickle) would fly alongside the Russian tricolor at patriotic observances, while having the Presidential Regiment fitted out in splendid new dress uniforms recalling the tsar’s guard force before 1917.⁹¹ In a sop to youth, he decreed on May 16 that Russia would have an all-volunteer army and conscription would be ended by 2000.

The biggest contribution of Igor Malashenko was to convince Yeltsin of the need for direct communication with the public. This was a way to both go beyond mediated contact and supply raw material for circulation in the mass media. In one of their first meetings, Malashenko told Yeltsin the story of how George H. W. Bush had profited politically from his dropping in at a New Jersey flag factory during the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Yeltsin needed scenes like that, Malashenko said, and would have to generate one headline per day that could be associated with him personally. “He grasped it at once,” Malashenko recalled. “I never had a reason to complain because, although his health was waning, he did incredible things. He made news every day.”⁹² It took several weeks for Yeltsin to grasp that he had to make contact locally and in the flesh. He wended his way through the Belgorod area south of Moscow in the first week of April and then through Krasnodar and Budënnovsk, the site of the 1995 terror incident, in mid-April. In Krasnodar Yeltsin stood behind a line of guards, with silent people kept at a distance. Malashenko and Chubais showed him photographs of the scene and contrasted it to his barnstorming in 1989–91. On his next field trip, to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East (where he dropped in on his way to Beijing), Yeltsin hoofed it into the crowd and “it produced a whole different image.”⁹³

May 3 found Yeltsin in Yaroslavl, on the Volga north of Moscow. The next week he alighted in Volgograd and Astrakhan on the lower Volga, and the week after that in central Siberia. The northern reaches of European Russia and the Urals followed at the end of May, and then came Tver, Kazan, two jaunts into the North Caucasus, west Siberia, Nizhnii Novgorod and the middle Volga, St. Petersburg, and, for a curtain call, Yekaterinburg on June 14. On May 9, for Victory Day over Nazi Germany, Yeltsin addressed the parade in Moscow’s Red Square. He then jetted to Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, to speak a second time at Mamayev Kurgan, the tumulus looking out over the Volga that bears a towering statue of Mother Russia. It was dusk, and people lit candles and flashlights. Press secretary Sergei Medvedev stood next to him: “I could sense that he was stirred up, as if by the common breathing of thousands of people. He had with him some prepared materials but threw them away and spoke effusively…. The people accepted him and cried out…. It was as if the air was electric, and he could feel it.”⁹⁴ The kinder, gentler Yeltsin jested with well-wishers and asked if they had questions for him, kissed ladies’ hands, and laid wreaths at statues and war memorials. Cordless microphone in hand, he forged through town squares, cathedrals, produce markets, army barracks, pig farms, fish hatcheries, foundries, and coal mines. During an interlude by musicians in Ufa on May 30, he did the twist: “Quite a plucky little twist it was, too, complete with swaying hips, flapping elbows, and upper teeth bared over lower lip. The 10,000 kids… went wild.” After Yeltsin waved and left the stage, Andrei Makarevich, lead singer of the rock group Time Machine, which had been kept off the radio under Brezhnev (and which performed before the Moscow White House in August 1991), urged them to vote for Yeltsin “so Time Machine can keep on playing.”⁹⁵ On June 10 at a concert by the pop singer Yevgenii Osin in a stadium in Rostov, on the Don River, Yeltsin called on the standing-room-only audience to “vote as you should” so they could all “live in a free Russia,” and then doffed his suit jacket and boogie-woogied with Osin and two miniskirted female vocalists.

No campaign event was complete without gifts large and small. The aim was to give a foretaste of the eventual benefits of reform and to underline the candidate’s responsiveness. As each day on the hustings was planned out the evening before, staffers asked Chto podarim zavtra?—“What shall we hand out tomorrow?”⁹⁶ The city of Yaroslavl provided a typical backcloth, as the New York Times correspondent described:

In the Siberian center of Krasnoyarsk on May 17, Yeltsin jibed to residents that he had thrown a coin into the Yenisei River for luck, “but you should not think that this will be the end of my financial help to the Krasnoyarsk region.”⁹⁸ On a stopover at the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk on May 24, he proclaimed that he had arrived “with full pockets.” “Today a little money will be coming into Arkhangelsk oblast.”⁹⁹ Having announced grants to local building projects there, he belted along to a meet-and-run in Vorkuta, a coal-mining center near the mouth of the Ob, where he committed to assistance for the construction of retirement homes in the south, a 50 percent reduction in rail tariffs on coal from the area—and, to miner Lidiya Denisyuk, whom he encountered underground, a Zhiguli car for her disadvantaged family.¹⁰⁰ In Chechnya on May 28 with Boris Nemtsov, he asked the governor to deliver Gazelle trucks and Volga cars to Chechen farmers from the GAZ plant in Nizhnii Novgorod. In Ufa on May 30, Yeltsin marked the beginning of preparatory construction work for its new subway. In Kazan on June 9, wearing a tyuboteika, a needlepointed Tatar skullcap, he promised to finance a subway; city and republic had been pushing for one since 1983. Elsewhere, the handouts included tractors and combines for kolkhozes, discounts on electricity costs, forgiveness of municipal debts, funds for reconstructing and enlarging libraries and clinics, and power-sharing pacts with governors and republic presidents (twelve of these were finalized during the campaign).

Promises made on the stump would be promises to keep afterward. The unrealism of some of those offered in 1996 was not lost on the craftsmen. They chose to subordinate this point to the realpolitik of winning in the here and now. The populist decree on ending the military draft by 2000 was a case in point. To write it, Yeltsin had to overrule the generals and his national security adviser, Yurii Baturin, who counseled that out of practical considerations the draft could not be dispensed with before 2005. Baturin refused to sign off on the draft edict, whereupon Nikolai Yegorov, the president’s new chief of staff—a conservative with good ties to the army—telephoned to say it would go ahead without him. “Now it is necessary to win the election, and after that we will look into it.”¹⁰¹ Russia today still has conscription.

Yeltsin’s last election campaign was a catch-all campaign. Vitalii Tret’yakov, the editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya gazeta, saw in his plan of attack the philosophy of Luka, the picaresque codger in the play The Lower Depths, by Maxim Gorky. “Ni odna blokha ne plokha,” Luka quipped to his fellow boarding-house residents—“Every flea is a good flea,” as they are all dark in color and they all know how to jump. “Yeltsin-Luka lets everyone gallop away” to their heart’s content, editorialized Tret’yakov; mixing metaphors, he added that the Yeltsin team had vacuumed up everyone else’s ideas and taken “one million positions on one hundred questions.” He was being somewhat unkind, for Yeltsin was consistent on some higher-order political questions, such as whether or not to let the communists return, while picking his openings on many lower-order questions. But Tret’yakov also noted that to Yeltsin’s million positions his opponents had been “unable to counterpoise clear and legible positions on even ten key problems.”¹⁰²

Tret’yakov’s editorial came out on May 7. Seventy-five million participating voters had their say on Sunday, June 16. Yeltsin took 26,665,495 votes. It was some 19 million fewer than he had received in 1991 but still put him in first place, with 36 percent of the ballots. Zyuganov had 32 percent, Lebed 15 percent, Yavlinskii 7 percent, and Zhirinovskii 6 percent. Everyone else trailed with less than 1 percent. In his final indignity at Yeltsin’s hands, Mikhail Gorbachev took one-half of 1 percent—386,069 votes. While bleeding strength compared to 1991 in every macroregion of Russia, Yeltsin carried forty-six of the provinces and Zyuganov forty-three. Yeltsin did better than average in the northern and northwestern sections of European Russia, Moscow, the Urals, and Siberia; he was weakest in the red belt south of Moscow and in the North Caucasus.

And so Yeltsin and Zyuganov found themselves in a sudden-death second round, with voting to occur on Wednesday, July 3, a workday. The strategy of the Yeltsin camp, aided by the electoral format, was simple—to distill everything to the toggle choice of forward on the historical continuum or backward. At the level of tactics, it dichotomized the decision as expertly as a fisherman filleting a trout. The choice could not be clearer, he stated on June 17. “Either back, to revolutions and turmoil, or ahead, to stability and prosperity.”¹⁰³ National television obliged by airing documentaries about the Gulag, the hounding of dissidents, and economic stagnation under the Soviets.¹⁰⁴

Two political melodramas unfolded overtly in the seventeen days between ballots. On June 18, as agreed in May, the third-finishing Aleksandr Lebed issued a statement endorsing Yeltsin. The price had gone up, as he was offered and accepted the position of secretary of the Security Council and assistant to the president for national security. Yeltsin relatedly dismissed his defense minister, Pavel Grachëv, who had once been Lebed’s commanding officer, and replaced him several weeks later with Igor Rodionov, an older general in whom Lebed had confidence. On June 20 a funding scandal pushed relations between Yeltsin and the clique around Aleksandr Korzhakov to the breaking point. The day before, officers in Korzhakov’s guard service had arrested Sergei Lisovskii and Arkadii Yevstaf’ev, two staffers to the Chubais team, on the steps of the White House and confiscated a half-million dollars in cash that was part of the funding stream for the campaign. When Chubais and Tatyana Dyachenko intervened, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov, Oleg Soskovets, and Mikhail Barsukov, a move that accented his decisiveness and innovativeness.¹⁰⁵

Another drama, playing out covertly, was about the incumbent’s medical condition, which had been abraded by stress, travel, and twelve-hour workdays. On June 23, midway between the two halves of the election, Yeltsin was hit with chest pains while on a whistle stop in Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. On June 26, resting at Barvikha-4, he was stricken with a fourth heart attack. His presiding physician, Anatolii Grigor’ev, was in the room and revived and medicated him. The seizure was kept secret and Yeltsin’s disappearance written off to a head cold. NTV’s president, Igor Malashenko, knew Yeltsin was in a bad way, if not the details, yet kept information about his condition out of the news. As he told me, he would have preferred “the corpse of Yeltsin” to Zyuganov alive.¹⁰⁶ On June 28 Yeltsin somehow bulled ahead with a meeting with Lebed on Chechnya. The klieg lights were shining and television cameras were whirring, but the scene was staged by staffers in a room of the Barvikha sanatorium, with them and the medical attendants edited out of the videotape.¹⁰⁷ All campaign appearances were canceled. Viktor Chernomyrdin read out a greeting to several thousand farm workers in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, who had gathered to hear the president. It did not sit well, and by Chubais’s estimate Yeltsin was losing 1 or 2 percentage points in the polls every day.¹⁰⁸ On July 3 it was all Yeltsin could do to take several steps with his wife and hand in a ballot slip at the polling station located in the sanatorium.

Irrespective of the fears, voting in the runoff went very much as planned. Yeltsin received 40,208,384 votes, about five million fewer than in 1991 but enough to outpoll Zyuganov by 54 percent to 41 percent. He carried fifty-seven of eighty-nine provinces, bettering his 1991 numbers in scattered oblasts and a number of the minority republics, losing strength in the red belt and the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus, and holding his own elsewhere. In between rounds, Yeltsin’s share of the popular vote went up 19 percentage points and Zyuganov’s by only 8 points. Division around the question of returning to communism or escaping it was more complete than in the opening round: 90-plus percent of those who favored the new political system voted for Yeltsin; 80 percent of those who wanted to re-create the communist system went for Zyuganov. Healthy majorities of the first-round supporters of the non-communist candidates other than Zhirinovskii went for the president now that their top choices were out of the game: 57 percent of the Lebed voters, 67 percent of Yavlinskii voters, 30 percent of Zhirinovskii voters, and 57 percent of those who had voted for the lightweight candidates.¹⁰⁹

Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally. He entered his second term as Russia’s leader under contradictory stars, one of them encouraging and the other pointing in a discouraging direction. The night of July 3, family and friends gave him teary hugs and flowers. He had accomplished “a fantastic, surprising victory.” He wished he could dance a jig, and one suspects he would not have been averse to some liquid refreshment, but these were beyond him: “I lay in my hospital bed and gazed tensely at the ceiling.”¹¹⁰ Right he was to be tense. The game hereafter was about Yeltsin trying to resume Russia’s progress while grappling with grievous physical limitations and with power parameters that had changed subtly and unsubtly from those of his first term.